


Heaven Can Wait (We're Watching the Skies)

by picarats



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV)
Genre: Artists, Canonical Character Death, Character Study, Dawn Summers is The Key, Dawn Summers-centric, Gen, Male-Female Friendship, Post-Episode: s07e22 Chosen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-29
Updated: 2020-12-29
Packaged: 2021-03-11 01:47:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,001
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28407216
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/picarats/pseuds/picarats
Summary: Sunnydale takes its shape on the canvas, even when Dawn doesn’t intend it to. The Magic Box shows up in short stripes of watercolour, saturating the paper; the high school is a mess of pastel that takes up too much of her time one day in December when she’s supposed to be sketching the model; the wreckage of the town crumbling underneath her feet is the charcoal coating the palms of her hands when she finally goes to wash them after a long day of class.Buffy's in Italy with Dracula for the holidays, so Dawn joins a life-drawing class at her local community college and accidentally strikes up a friendship over art with her sister's formerly-homicidal ex-boyfriend. Must be Tuesday.(Dawn-centric, set post-Chosen.)
Relationships: Angel & Dawn Summers, Dawn Summers & Scooby Gang
Kudos: 5





	Heaven Can Wait (We're Watching the Skies)

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: I don't own anything.

She’s twenty-four and nine-thousand and seventy-three at the same time; for most of her life, she’s been an inanimate ball of ethereal green light. It’s about time Dawn Summers picks up a hobby.

So Dawn signs up for a life-drawing class.

And another. And another. And then the next time she puts her pencil to paper, it’s apparently enough to impress the instructor walking by — so much so that she’s invited to the community college the next week to interview as an assistant in the fine art department. Something about her the way her Key-brain works, she supposes: fitting in wherever she can to hide.

It’s not entirely the gig she’s looking for, anyway, so Dawn says no. Too many of the people in her life have been artists, she thinks, one day, absentmindedly. Dawn’s in the middle of tracing her way through the curve of the model’s hip when the works of Angelus spring to mind again. Hadn’t he broken in, one night — drew Buffy whilst she was asleep? Now, Dawn knows she’s not going to do any of that creepy vampire stuff, but _still_.

It’s enough to make her lie awake that night, thinking about the mediums people share. Angel and Buffy shared the language of fighting, the melody, the beat of saving people and slaying; Angel and Dawn share stretched fabric on wood and all of the things you make from it. Same with Buffy and Giles and Giles and Dawn: two different, shared understandings — with less of a martyr complex on Dawn’s side, of course. It’s a fair trade off, she thinks.

And now, when Dawn gets the envious, Slayer-sister itch, the stuff that made her act out as a kid and makes her want to go all Faith-style on the universe as an almost-full-adult, what does she do? She breaks out the colouring pencils. Go figure.

Sunnydale takes its shape on the canvas, even when Dawn doesn’t intend it to. The Magic Box shows up in short stripes of watercolour, saturating the paper; the high school is a mess of pastel that takes up too much of her time one day in December when she’s supposed to be sketching the model; the wreckage of the town crumbling underneath her feet is the charcoal coating the palms of her hands when she finally goes to wash them after a long day of class.

When no-one’s looking, Dawn filches a picture of everyone during Buffy and Willow’s first year of college from an album, ignores the preteen who shouldn’t _be_ in said photo at that point and starts to get to work. What’s that saying, again? Good artists borrow, great artists steal. You got it, boss. Dawn’s stolen a place in a life that wasn’t hers before. She can handle drawing people from references.

Dawn sends Xander a portrait of himself in Africa; he sends her a postcard of himself and his tiny Slayer-group with a crudely drawn thumbs up on the other side and a stick figure of a girl holding a book that’s labelled _Sumerian for Dummies_. When she stops laughing, it goes right on her and Buffy’s fridge. (Buffy’s in Italy again, sorting something out with Dracula. She’ll move it before then, Dawn thinks. It’s nice decorating a place like it’s just hers.)

Willow gets a gouache-and-watercolour painting of herself and Tara one cold Tuesday in January. Gouache is expensive, Dawn has decided, but she can’t think of anything else that the old Watcher’s Council would hate more than her spending some of their funds on paint.

Despite her financial rationalisations — hey, that Word-A-Day calendar ended up being pretty useful — she knows that for Tara, it’s worth it. She was always so kind, Dawn thinks. From the very happy phone call Willow makes to her across the ocean once it’s shipped to Oxford, she knows that it was the right way to capture that kindness, the brightest colours through a water wash of magic.

Money, of _course_ , makes her think of Anya, because apparently that’s the way Dawn’s mind works. So, another package in the mail Xander’s way: seven-by-five inches of pure former-demon-turned-the _coolest_ person Dawn’s ever met and the only one that didn’t treat her like a complete kid back then, even when she didn’t fully understand Dawn’s then-crush on her boyfriend.

Shared experiences for a Summers sister, again. Go figure. She’s trying to figure out a style right now, anyway, so Anya ends up inked and stylised, comic-book action lines surrounding her ever-present righteous, victorious expression in life.

Dawn doesn’t get a postcard this time, but in the next shipment of books from Xander’s station she finds a protection amulet — this one’s Ancient Greek, so she’s not entirely sure where he found it in Cape Town — but she recognises it for what it is. It’s probably supposed to be for her, but Dawn files it away in case they ever come across any other ex-Chaos Demon in need of help. A way of giving back to Anya’s memory that isn’t through speech bubbles.

Angel and her have a very stilted conversation around a week after that. He was obviously expecting to have Buffy pick up, so Dawn has to tell him about Venice and canal boats and the Prince of Darkness — well, she doesn’t _have_ to, but it’s kind of funny to hear him become even more emotionally constipated over the line and she hasn’t exactly forgiven him for the Angelus thing, either: not since she’s been thinking about it more recently. The guy terrorised her Mom, for God’s sake. That’s not something you can really forgive.

At the end of the two-minute awkward-fest, Angel says, “I’ve seen your art. It’s pretty good.”

“I wouldn’t call it art,” Dawn replies. Then she actually _processes_ what he just said. “When did _you_ see my stuff?”

“Willow showed me,” Angel says. “I never got to meet Tara, but I think you captured her well.”

This is getting _way_ too chummy, Dawn thinks. “Okay. Thanks?”

“You should do a show.”

“In Cleveland?” Dawn shakes her head, thinking of all of the art shows her Mom made her dress up and go to in Los Angeles when they hadn’t been run out of town by Dad’s divorce and Buffy’s cigarette-smoking rats. “I don’t really want to sell.”

It’s not good to monetise all of your hobbies, non-demony ones _and_ demony ones. Dawn’s learned that the hard way, translating books for hire and accidentally summoning wayward demons on the payroll. It’s something that’s happened on way too many Tuesdays to count.

“You could,” Angel points out, not disagreeing, “but everyone sells stuff nowadays. Are you — are you coming to Los Angeles any time soon?”

Dawn frowns. “No.”

“Oh,” Angel says, after a second. Dawn can instantly tell whatever plan he was making in his head has dissipated, but she can also tell that he’s going to say it anyway. None of Buffy’s ex-boyfriends have ever been as cool as her older sister thought they were. “Well, if you do end up visiting, there’s a pottery class I go to when I can. It’s pretty late, but — it could be fun.”

Dawn almost rejects him on the spot — she just tends not to make nice with her sister’s star-crossed lovers — but the unique thing about Angel is that she knows they probably have the same amount of actual friends and _any_ reaching-out for _either_ of them is a big step.

“Sounds good,” she says, instead, “so long as there aren’t any Ghost shenanigans. Hey, can I call you Swayze?”

“Nope,” Angel says. He immediately hangs up. Good for him, Dawn thinks.

The next on her list is Riley Finn, a man she’s only ever met twice — when this picture was taken and when Buffy took him to meet the family officially. She paints him like an old, pulp-y action book hero, oils and acrylic: the Bruce Willis-type, except with hair. Like Jack Reacher, or one of the other thousand airport heroes she’s read on flights over the years. Ooh, or the silver fox on the cover of the _Stargate_ box set Andrew’s lent her.

She doesn’t have an address. It’s probably for the best.

When he cottons on, Giles personally asks Dawn not to make a portrait of him. When he became Buffy’s Watcher, he had to sit for _hours_ for an official artwork to be hung in the Council’s hallowed halls. It was one of the many things he found himself not being torn up about post-explosion. But Dawn wants to anyway — and she’s not so good with the whole impulse thing — so Giles finds his way out through a little doodle in the corner of a napkin in a cafe on Market Ave’. She’s pretty sure she’s got Xander’s little stick army thing down pat.

She doesn’t draw Spike, though. That kind of wound’s too fresh.

Buffy comes home not wanting to talk about Italy; Dawn thinks that’s swell, because she doesn’t want to talk about paint on canvas. Her time with Buffy is mostly spent enjoying each others’ company until either one of them breaks and starts screaming at the other: it’s called being sisters, after all.

They watch the new season of Survivor and root for one guy until he drops out halfway through the season, wherefore after Buffy chooses a girl from the winning team who Dawn is pretty sure might be a Slayer and Dawn picks out an underdog from the other just to be contrary. Buffy wins.

A month in, Angel calls, again and Buffy is there this time. It turns out he’s calling for Dawn, actually, which makes her sister unimpressed and act very shoot-the-messenger-y for the entire next week.

Whatever: his pottery class is having a Showcase Night, which is LA for half of the evening being spent looking at abstract representations of bowls and the other half being a taster session for the class itself. They do the same thing for pyramid schemes, Dawn thinks, and says ‘no’ as delicately as she can. Then Buffy picks that night to have an argument about not washing up the plates properly and she rings Angel right back.

It’s funny how life works. So: Los Angeles. City of Angels, the city Dawn grew up in — except she didn’t, really — and a city she hasn’t been to for around a decade or at all, depending on your views about green orb-y things. It’s at once familiar and unfamiliar when Angel picks her up at LAX; she recognises the duty-free but not the faces. Yay, capitalism! (Yay, Botox.)

The show takes place on the third floor of a warehouse that’s been converted into a community centre. (Dawn can still smell the fumigation gas in the air.) This gives them ample time to make awkward small talk in the taxi ride to Angel’s apartment, _in_ Angel’s apartment while Dawn dumps her suitcase for the night, the walk to the building and the elevator ride up. They cover maybe four topics — her flight, the weather, how LA’s doing — after an apocalypse Dawn’s guiltily only _just_ remembered about — and art.

Unsurprisingly, art is what they talk about the most. They share that same language, after all.

Drawing classes don’t cover ‘The History Of’, but what Dawn’s read on Wikipedia doesn’t compare to Angel having actually lived through those ages. It’s the best part of her actual job, interviewing the willing almost-immortal — part of the reason she’d been so jealous of Buffy not bringing her along to meet Dracula — so to combine that love with her other one? It’s fascinating, no more because Angelus once murdered a man for a Rembrandt that is in a storage locker somewhere. Here be the un-life between oils and gold filigree leaf, Dawn Summers: have at it, before you have to put some of your own in a kiln tonight.

“Spike was more into poetry,” Angel recalls. Yes: Spike was always poetry, not art — and there’s no way Dawn can spin a rhyme like she can paint. She’d had a moody Beat phrase, of course, encouraged by him: ‘ _Vampire Slayer for a sister / My life caught up in a twister’_. (Dawn didn’t say it was good.) “And Dru’s visions were art all on their own.”

“William the Bloody,” Dawn says. “What about the other one? Uh, Darla?”

Angel exhales, amused. “Darla’s a music all onto herself,” he says. He doesn’t elaborate on the present tense: Dawn’s not sure she wants to ask. “She never cared much for murals unless they were made from blood from the bodies of — Sorry,” he amends, suddenly clocking that not _everyone_ wants to hear about vampire murders in the eighteenth century. “It’s not exactly a nice conversation, is it?”

“I don’t mind,” Dawn says, because she’s not ‘not everyone’. “I’m more into the truth than half-truths. I’m one of those myself, so I’m pretty sick of them.”

Angel glances at her out of the corner of his eyes. (They’re walking together, side-by-side. Anyone would say they were siblings, Dawn thinks.) “You look pretty real to me,” he says.

 _That’s the point,_ Dawn doesn’t reply. She would have done, maybe two years ago — but she’s her own person now. Her own ‘ _a_ person’. After all, an artwork is more than the sum of its parts. “Thanks, I guess. How long until we get there?”

At the Showcase, Angel tours her around the works of his classmates. It’s both the clay and the people that catch her eye. They’re pretty amazing, Dawn thinks, swapping numbers with a trauma nurse who manages her long hours and her two kids — Miles and María — with sculpting pots and vases.

 _It’s free therapy_ , a bodega cashier who greets Angel with a bro-hug says to her: from what Dawn’s experienced in her own time, that idea couldn’t be more correct. He then starts to ask Angel why he didn’t call him after their date and Dawn tries to listen but look like she’s tuned out at the same time. She’s pretty sure it’s not working, seeing how quick Angel whisks her away to look at his own stuff.

Dawn carefully picks up a strong-looking jug. It’s glazed with an orange coat; speckles of yellow poke out from underneath. It looks like a plant cell diagram, almost. Or an orange peel.

“Salt glaze,” Angel clarifies, when she asks. “German, but London made it popular. Only time I’ll ever look to the British for anything.”

“I won’t tell Giles you said that.” Dawn comments, flipping it over. There’s a small maker’s mark — it’s in the shape of the angel she’s seen on the business card her office has. “It’s pretty sturdy.”

“Oh, no, you can tell him,” Angel says, without missing a beat. “It’s coarse ware. Sort of stuff we used growing up.”

It takes a moment for it to click in Dawn’s brain that Angel means growing up in the seventeen-hundreds, which is just — insane. “Ah,” she says, sets it down. Art endures, she thinks. “Well, I like it. A lot.”

Angel raises an eyebrow. “You have no point of reference.”

“So?” Dawn says, raising an eyebrow. “I like it.”

Angel does it so quickly that she knows she’s not supposed to see it, but he does smile at that. Another point to vague sibling energy, Dawn guesses. “Come on,” he says. “Let’s make some bowls.”

It turns out Dawn is absolutely terrible. The Key’s two-dimensional art complex doesn’t seem to work with clay and a wheel and water; the monks didn’t preload Dawn Summers with sculpting know-how. It’s the kind of frustration that can be solved by hard work without any kind of mysticism shoving its way into her life.

This is her level zero: a new skill without an unexplainable, supernatural boost. It’s a relief, Dawn thinks. She’s human, a person. People make mistakes.

“What is that?” Buffy asks, when Dawn unpacks her fired clay from a shipped box three weeks later. She has the bubble wrap Dawn gave her between her blue shaped fingernails, popping one at a time.

Dawn lifts the offending item up. “It’s a mug,” she says.

Buffy eyes it. “There’s no handle,” she says. “It’s too long.”

Dawn nods. “That is very true.”

The TV is muted. “I can see a massive hole in the side.”

“So there is,” Dawn says, turning it over in her ink-stained hands. “And it’s completely misshapen,” she adds. Buffy waves at it like she was about to say that exact thing. It’s pretty obvious, Dawn thinks, so she’s not going to give her points.

They put it on the mantelpiece, in front of the portrait Dawn made of their mother — Buffy-commissioned, because of course she found out about the whole art hyperfixation — fired, unglazed clay pride of place next to practiced oils and acrylic. It’s so blindingly ugly that Dawn can’t feel anything but happiness when she looks at it.

In the spring, Dawn patches up the hole with putty and fills the thing with daffodils from a gas station. Buffy doesn’t comment on them before they set off for Dawn’s little exhibition show — yes, ‘in _Cleveland_ ’, judgy past-her — so Dawn can only assume she hasn’t seen them. That suits Dawn just fine. Some things are nice to do just for the sake of it, Dawn thinks.

It’s a new concept for her, but it’s definitely held true so far.

Everyone comes to the show — her co-workers, Willow, Xander, Giles, Principal Wood who she can’t remember to call Robin to save her life, the baby slayers — and the ones that can’t come stay alive in the brush-strokes of her works. She’s painted Spike, now: it’s subtle, but he’s there, under the night sky hanging over the LA community centre Angel had taken her to. If she concentrates, or zones out, Dawn can smell his cigarettes in the air.

It’s easy. People live forever in drawings, so long as you don’t do them in the kind of felt-tip that disappears in the sun.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much for reading!


End file.
